Identifying the bodies recovered from an abandoned mineshaft in South Africa this week will be a “difficult task”, a police spokesman said.

Brigadier General Athelenda Matt told reporters near the top of the Steelfontein mine that 78 bodies and more than 240 illegal miners had been brought to the surface since Monday as part of the rescue operation.

They’ve been underground since at least November.

At the time, authorities stepped up efforts to stop illegal mining, surrounding mine entrances and denying food and water access to the shafts.

The police always said the miners could come out at any time.

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Bodies and living people have now been cleared from the mine, police said.

Brigadier Matt said only two of the dead had been identified so far.

“Some of them (bodies) were decomposed corpses, mostly bones,” she added.

DNA testing is underway, but another challenge in identifying people is that “most of the people[found]are undocumented immigrants,” she added. Their families may not have known they were in the mines to begin with.

The vast majority of survivors are from neighboring countries such as Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

A union and rights activists accused authorities of overseeing a massacre.

But police defended their actions, saying they were fighting crime and key figures responsible for illegal mining were controlling the flow of supplies and trying to prevent people from re-emerging.

During a visit on Tuesday, the police and mining ministers were insulted and asked to leave by an angry crowd who blamed the government for the deaths.

Police said more than 1,500 miners came to the surface before the rescue operation began.

Others, however, remain underground, either out of fear of arrest or forced to stay there by the gangs that control the mines.

Over the past three decades, many mines in South Africa have been abandoned by companies that deemed them not economically viable.

The mines have been taken over by gangs, often former employees, who sell the minerals they find on the black market.

These include the Steelfontein mine, about 145 kilometers (90 miles) southwest of the country’s largest city, Johannesburg, which has been the focus of the government’s crackdown on the illegal industry.

The rescue cage was moved all the way down the shaft to reach the miners, who are thought to be at least 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) underground.

Many survivors have been without food and water since November, leaving them emaciated. They are now receiving medical care.

Authorities said they would be charged with illegal mining, trespassing and violating immigration laws, as most of the miners are undocumented immigrants.

“This is a crime against the economy, an attack on the economy,” Mines Minister Gwede Mantashe said on Wednesday as he defended his tough stance against miners.

Before the industry fell into recession, South Africa relied heavily on miners from countries such as Lesotho and Mozambique.

South Africa’s unemployment rate currently exceeds 30%, and many former miners say they have few other sources of income.